Sarah Ruhl's "In the Next Room' at the Wilma (3rd review)

Sarah Ruhl's new play, In the Next Room, or the Vibrator Play, is set in the dawn of the electric age, one of whose side effects was quite literally to stimulate the sexual revolution. Among the first applications of electricity in medicine was an attempt to relieve the symptoms of "hysteria," the all-purpose name given to the common female affliction that Freud would soon diagnose as neurosis grounded in sexual repression. (The law applied electricity at the same time, in the electric chair.) Ruhl poses twin questions: how electric light transformed our sense of vision, and how artificially induced orgasms transformed our sexuality.

Dr. Givings (no first name; this is Victorian America, and even wives address their husbands by their professional titles) specializes in the new vibrator therapy. His wife, Catherine, also suffers the symptoms of hysteria (nervous energy; hyperactive curiosity), but he doesn't seem to see it.

His attention is focused instead on a new patient, Sabrina Daldry, whose problem is lassitude and low vitality. She responds wonderfully to the vibrator, and has what no one in the room— doctor, patient, or spinster Nurse Annie— recognizes, because, apparently, no one there has ever seen or experienced it: a first-class female orgasm, outflung arms and legs, ecstatic cries and all.

Electricity vs. candlelight

Sabrina's treatment soon palls, though, and Givings has to amp it up to the point where he short-circuits the entire household. Catherine fetches candles, not without relief, since she has missed the familiar rituals of candle and gas lighting, and the intimate shadows that candlelight throws.

Electric incandescence, in contrast, is mere illumination, uniform, undifferentiated, pragmatic, and dull— just the sort of "improvement" a practical-minded nation would invent for itself.

The doctor's vibrator is, similarly, an instrument that produces effect without affect: orgasm without love. In the darkness of Victorian sexuality, however, any light— the more direct and penetrating the better— would appear to be welcome. Is it, though? Is that which is brought to light necessarily liberating? And, speaking of cant words, just what is "liberation" anyway?

Gay subtext

The gay subtext of the play (both Catherine and Sabrina appear to connect more emotionally and sexually with Annie than they do with their husbands) isn't very subtle, and includes as well a male patient, Leo, who is treated anally. As the induced orgasms multiply onstage, the principle of diminishing returns applies to the audience as well as the characters.

The sexually franker lower classes are represented by a black wet nurse, Elizabeth, whose profession of course depends on the higher infant mortality rates of the poor. Comedic resolution is provided at the end when Catherine and her equally repressed husband discover conjugal bliss at last.

Actors obscured

The Wilma has opened its backstage to create a salon-style set for the production: not theater in the round, but a mirror-imaged stage in which each half of the audience sees the play from a different angle. Blocking compensates for this for the most part, but there are critical dramatic moments in which one set of viewers or the other has to gape for action that's partly obscured.

The performers are all fine—Mairin Lee as a spunky Catherine, Jeremiah Wiggins as her clueless spouse, Kate Czajkowski as the straitlaced Sabrina, John C. Vennema as the frustrated Daldry, Krista Apple as lovelorn Annie, Opal Alladin as dignified Elizabeth, and above all the Leo of Luigi Sottile, who gives an uproarious performance as a skirt-chasing artist and steals every scene he gets into.

Director Blanka Zizka keeps the play on the move— no small feat in a two and a half hour drawing-room comedy.

Implausible ending

Tragedy might be defined as an inquiry into the human condition, and comedy as an inquest of its mores. Where sex is concerned, the two tend to be inseparable, and the outcome is frequently farce. That's true enough in Ruhl's play, but even in farce a certain amount of plausibility is requisite, and her happy ending is so over the top— and so at variance with everything that has preceded it— that one is left with the sense of a text scuttling itself. What results is a work that tries finally to have it both ways— A Doll's House without the walkout scene.

This won't do. Ruhl owes us, and herself, more.♦


To read another review by Dan Rottenberg, click here.
To read another review by Jackie Atkins, click here.